Anti-APT startup Lastline heads for London's Tech City

Californian anti-APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) security play Lastline is opening a UK office in London's Tech City district, the latest in a small but steady stream of startups to spy business riches in a jump across the Atlantic.

Californian anti-APT (Advanced Persistent Threat) security play Lastline is opening a UK office in London's Tech City district, the latest in a small but steady stream of startups to spy business riches in a jump across the Atlantic.

The firm is still young and tiny but has decided to use some of a $10 million haul of summer venture funding to offer UK buyers competition to better-known rivals in the same space, FireEye and Damballa.

With CEO Jens Andreassen picked up for his experience as head of international sales at Fortinet, Lastline will plans to build a small core of developers and researchers to populate its Tech City hub.

"It's a very confusing space because everybody's jumping on it," Andreassen told Techworld.

Naturally, he preaches the superiority of the firm's Previct system based on technology that claims it can detect traces of evasive malware using anomaly analysis, machine learning, rolled up with a hint of the big data story people are suddenly fascinated by.

"Some of the activity we can block. If the [malware] dropper is installed we will see the binary coming in and run it in our own environment to determine if it is malicious," he said.

The sell will involve getting its nascent integrator channel to explain the subtleties of this approach to business buyers wary of piling a new security box on top of the ones they already have.

Business-wise, it's early days for the company in a rapidly-growing space but the timing might turn out to be good; Andreassen declined to name any UK customers for its products but said that trials were ongoing.